Royal Revival Bolstered by castoffs such as righthander Jose Lima, Kansas City is the unlikely leader in the AL Central. But are the Royals for real?

When you're on Lima Time, the Kansas City Royals are learning, every hour is Happy Hour. Every base hit, every runner moved over--heck, every two-strike foul ball--is cause for a bellow or chirp from the dugout's top step, and every fifth day the pitcher's mound is home to the stylings of the indefatigable Jose Lima, back from the baseball dead. "I'm still here," he says. "I'm not going nowhere. There's a lot of Jose Lima left." ¬∂ Typically demonstrative on Sunday afternoon at Detroit's Comerica Park, the 30-year-old righthander threw five shutout innings in a 5-1 win over the Tigers, lifting his record to 7-0 while lowering his ERA to 2.17. Since Lima joined the team on June 15, theRoyals had gone 24-14 by week's end and rallied from afive-game deficit to a 4 1/2-game lead in the AL Central. WithLima starring in the latest scenes of this midsummer theater ofthe absurd, the nondescript Royals stood poised to pull off thegreatest encore to a 100-loss season in history (chart, page53). "We just seem to know we're going to win somehow, someway," says leftfielder Raul Ibanez, tied for the team lead inhomers (14) with centerfielder Carlos Beltran. "Something willhappen, someone will throw a ball away, whatever. We're doingthe stuff that I've watched the good teams do to us."

Despite the brevity of his sojourn with Kansas City, Lima has come to symbolize the club's renaissance. After a lousy, acrimonious season with the Tigers--used sporadically, he was 4-6 with a 7.77 ERA and opined that Detroit "stinks from the front office right on down" after he was bounced from the starting rotation in September--the former 21-game winner was released. A back strain curtailed his winter ball season in his native Dominican Republic, and when spring training began he couldn't wrangle even a nonroster invitation to a big league camp. He was adrift in baseball limbo. Lima believes he was blackballed because Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski labeled him a clubhouse cancer, both in conversations with fellow executives and in a letter to MLB headquarters. (Dombrowski denies the allegations.) "I thought I was going to get a job right away," Lima says. "[But] no minor league deal. Nobody wanted my services. 'We're not interested. We've got plenty of talent.' Something was said, and I know who said it."

As March gave way to April, Lima, still unemployed, pondered retiring or globetrotting to the Japanese or Korean leagues before he got his first bite: Joe Klein, the former Tigers G.M. who's now the executive director of the independent Atlantic League, offered Lima a $3,000-a-month gig with the Newark Bears. ("My phone bill's higher than that," Lima says.) Chastened but still possessed of his bottomless optimism, Lima accepted and immersed himself in the farmhand's life. "He never asked for special treatment," says Bears manager Bill Madlock. "He worked hard, showed up early and did his running, threw on the side, and he really took care of the kids on the team. They don't eat the same since he left."

That's because Lima and fellow Bear Rickey Henderson, now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, routinely handed their paychecks to clubhouse attendants to cover postgame spreads, getting deliveries from Outback Steakhouse instead of the usual cold cut platters. When Newark played the Pennsylvania Road Warriors, a quasi-barnstorming team without a home ballpark, Lima paid for their spread too. On days he didn't pitch, Lima coached first base and tossed so many balls into the crowd that the cash-strapped club had to remind him that there was a $20 fine for doing so.

Lima quickly regained the stuff that had made him an All-Star with the Houston Astros in 1999. Always a two-pitch pitcher who approached hitters "backward" (that is, throwing his changeup instead of his fastball in hitter's counts), Lima had lost so much velocity on his four-seamer that the two pitches became nearly indistinguishable and fooled no one. But with regular work and by tweaking his windup--he now brings his left leg toward second base as he pivots on his right foot, rather than opening it up toward third--Lima nudged his fastball back into the low 90s. His bravado returned too. "He pitched against Long Island, middle of May, and somebody hit a home run off him, and you heard 'Big league, my ass' from their dugout," Klein says. "Jose came back and struck out something like five of the last seven he faced, including the guy who said it. That's when I knew it was just a matter of time."

Facing imminent DL trips by starters Miguel Asencio and Runelvys Hernandez, the Royals came knocking. On Klein's recommendation to his longtime friend Art Stewart, general manager Allard Baird's senior adviser, Kansas City inked Lima, sight unseen, for the major league minimum. Says Baird, "We thought, Let's at least get an innings guy." By reeling off a seven-game winning streak and holding opponents to a .197 batting average, Lima showed he was much more. Still blessed with pinpoint control and equipped with a new slider, taught to him by Royals pitching coach John Cumberland, Lima has become a more well-rounded pitcher. "He's putting the ball where he wants to," says catcher Brent Mayne. "Opponents aren't really getting much to hit."

Lima's unconventional path back to the majors underscores not only the constitution of this first-place team, but also the success of the often-maligned Baird, who is still remembered for trading Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez. Limited by a $40.8 million payroll, the game's second-lowest, Baird has expertly trolled backwoods leagues and castoff piles to construct his roster. In addition to Lima, there's lefthander Darrell May (5-4 with a 3.33 ERA in a team-high 127 innings at week's end), signed in 2001 from Yomiuri of the Japan Central League, and rightfielder and leadoff hitter Aaron Guiel (nine homers, .941 OPS since his May 28 callup), plucked in '00 from Oaxaca of the Mexican League. Asencio, one of the organization's best pitching prospects, and righthander D.J. Carrasco, a bullpen workhorse with a 3.93 ERA in 50 1/3 innings, are both Rule 5 draftees.

Credit for their artful use, however, goes to skipper Tony Pena. "You have to have a manager who is willing to put that Rule 5 guy in a pressure situation," Baird says. "In our market size, to make it work, it has to be that way." Pena constantly says that he's comfortable using any member of his 25-man roster in any situation, and the results have borne him out. Pena has trotted out 10 starting pitchers, and they'd gone a combined 37-27 with a 4.46 ERA through Sunday.

Lightly regarded minor leaguer Angel Berroa, whose listed age went from 22 to 25 during the imbroglio over the birthdates of Dominican players last year, earned the Opening Day shortstop assignment, and at week's end was hitting .289 with 13 home runs at the position Perez had turned into an offensive sinkhole. When All-Star first baseman Mike Sweeney was lost to upper back stiffness on June 19, Pena inserted Ken Harvey, who'd hit .244 in his 57 major league games; Harvey has hit .284 since.

Pena is able to maintain the easygoing, open demeanor essential to a young club. "I give my players some freedom," he says. "You need some space, room to make mistakes and correct yourself. I'm not going to scream at you, call you some kind of name or grab you by the chest." Last Thursday afternoon at Minnesota, Harvey misplayed a Shannon Stewart bunt in the bottom of the eighth, throwing wide of the bag for a two-base error that keyed a four-run inning and the Twins' 6-2 victory. Afterward Pena brusquely cut off a reporter who asked about the miscue. "My players know I am not going to crucify them for one mistake," he said. "All I want is for him to come back with a clear head tomorrow." The next day in Detroit, with the Tigers trailing 2-1 and two men on in the fourth, Harvey vacuumed up a blistering Eric Munson grounder inside the chalk, pivoted neatly to fire the ball to second, then hustled to the bag to complete a difficult 3-6-3 double play that ended the inning. Kansas City would win 8-3. "[Pena] obviously remembers what it's like to play, what it's like to fail and succeed," says reliever Jason Grimsley. "He knows when guys need a kick in the ass and when they need a pat on the back."

The Royals' fortunes have already picked up at the gate. Although their average attendance of 22,487 ranked 21st overall through Sunday, it's their highest since 1994, when they finished four games out in a strike-shortened season. How high the turnout climbs depends on how K.C. plays down the stretch. Sweeney's return to the lineup, expected in mid-to-late August, will add an impact bat, but the team has more serious deficiencies than any other division leader. The bullpen is undependable--at week's end it packed a 5.59 ERA and had surrendered 1.2 home runs per nine innings (12th)--but at least it's a tight-knit group. Last Thursday night all the relievers scored backstage passes to Ozzy Osbourne's Ozzfest show in Detroit, but arrived straight from the airport still clad in suits, prompting one onlooker to observe, "There go Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers."

Baird added righty Curtis Leskanic in a trade with the Milwaukee Brewers last month--inspiring Pena to pen the ditty, "No need to panic, we've got Leskanic," and Leskanic to respond, "I don't know where he gets it from. It's like the child in him is coming out"--but even with Monday's acquisition of Graeme Lloyd from the New York Mets, the bullpen is short on lefthanders. Rookie closer Mike MacDougal, whose heater grazes triple digits and whose roller-coaster breaking ball occasionally looks brilliant, has struggled to locate his fastball since the All-Star break.

To this point the Royals have overachieved. Says Ibanez, "When we play good teams and you look up the runs per game, we're about the same as them; ERA, about the same. And they might have outscored us for the season, but somehow we've got more wins than they do. I think we just find a way to win and we're resilient." Or lucky. Bill James's Pythagorean theorem, which expresses the relationship between runs scored and runs allowed as an anticipated winning percentage, suggests that Kansas City, which at week's end had outscored opponents just 531-525, should be a .500 team; instead, the Royals were 11 games over. Using that formula the second-place Chicago White Sox should lead the AL Central by a game over K.C. The Royals are also streaky--their 16-3 sprint out of the gate was followed by a 12-26 skid, and a concomitant 10-game swing in the standings, from 5 1/2 up to 4 1/2 back--and will face a slightly tougher schedule down the stretch than the third-place Minnesota Twins. (The defending Central champs are 6 1/2 games back but play 31 of their remaining 58 games against pushovers Cleveland, Texas and Detroit.)

All of this is lost on the Royals, who appear at home atop the division. "It's like the weirdest thing," says Leskanic, "but this clubhouse is exactly the same, win or lose. We don't blow it out, and we don't mope. No one even talks about being in first place. Maybe we don't want to jinx it, but guys out in the bullpen don't even look at the scores." Kansas City has faith in its rejuvenated ace and its inspirational manager, the man who, while driving between Mayaguez and San Juan during a winter scouting trip to Puerto Rico, concocted the slogan We believe. Unveiled on the first day of spring training, it's still on players' lips and emblazoned on T-shirts throughout the clubhouse.

"What I saw in my ball club last year was players with great enthusiasm, with ability, but making a lot of mistakes," Pena says. "It seemed like they didn't believe in themselves, so I said, 'O.K., I'm gonna come out and say I believe.' The veterans were the first ones to follow." Kansas City believes. The rest of us are watching, slowly coming around.

COLOR PHOTO: LINDA KAYE/AP I'M BACK! The fiery Lima has made a believer out of Pena (left) after being unloaded by the worst team in baseball.COLOR PHOTO: ED ZURGA/AP [See caption above]COLOR PHOTO: CHRIS CARLSON/AP ONE-TWO PUNCH K.C. has bowled over opponents with rookies such as Harvey (above) and established stars like Beltran.COLOR PHOTO: ED ZURGA/AP [See caption above]COLOR PHOTO: JEFF TAYLOR/REUTERS SEEING IS BELIEVING Says Ibanez of the suddenly swaggering Royals: "We just know we're going to win somehow."

TURNAROUNDS OF THE CENTURY

The Royals are threatening an unprecedented resurgence

AT ITS CURRENT PACE Kansas City, which was 62-100 last year, would not only have a shot to become the first team to make the playoffs following a 100-loss season, but would also finish with the best record (91-71) of any of the 125 clubs that lost at least 100 games the previous year. Since 1900 these teams had the best winning percentages in a season after a 100-loss season.